Creating a Personal Hall of Merit
Maybe you think the BBTF Hall of Merit improved on Cooperstown, or maybe not, but just about everybody thinks their personal version would be the best of all. HOM voters somewhat commonly go down the path of creating the HOM that reflects their own views on historical player rankings, and this is called their Personal Hall of Merit (often written pHOM in BBTF discussions).
If you follow the guidelines that BBTF has set up, creating your personal HOM can be a bit time consuming, but it will give you a greater appreciation of the process and a much greater understanding of why the HOM looks the way it does. Of course, you don't have to follow the BBTF guidelines, but then you should not expect your results to align very well with the project's. The HOM itself would probably look very notably different if the same voters were just told to pick the best X number of players from history - but you can create your pHOM any way you like.
If you want to populate your own "official" pHOM, you'll need a few pieces of information to get started. First, you'll need to know how many players to select in each yearly election, and second, you'll need to know which players are actually eligible at that time. Eligibility works similarly to the HOF - players are eligible after five years of retirement (not including "token" appearances at the end of a career). Third, you'll need to follow the voting prerogatives of the HOM - namely: voting must be fair to all eras in baseball history and fair to all leagues, voting is based on a player's statistical record, and voting must be consistent (you can't cast a sympathy vote for Mark Lemke because he was one of your childhood favorites, you have to make all your votes based on a consistent application of your best effort at identifying the most worthy).
Going through this process is practically guaranteed to give you a much broader understanding of the landscape of baseball's star players through the course of its history. I learned a great deal through this exercise, and I have been almost a life-long baseball fan.
For example, my personal Hall of Merit exchanges 20 players in the actual HOM for replacements I think are preferable.
In:
Fred Dunlap (1900)
Eddie Cicotte (1930)
Bob Johnson (1960)
Dizzy Dean (1972)
Jack Quinn (1973)
Larry Jackson (1979)
Sal Bando (1987)
Marvin Williams (1991)
Tommy John (1995)
Buddy Bell (1996)
Chet Lemon (1997)
Ron Cey (2000)
Chuck Finley (2008)
Kirby Puckett (2008)
Kevin Appier (2009)
Robin Ventura (2012)
John Olerud (2012)
Roy Oswalt (2022)
Brian Giles (2022)
David Wright (2023)
Out:
Hardy Richardson (1905)
Sam Thompson (1929)
Bob Caruthers (1930)
Jimmy Sheckard (1930)
Dickey Pearce (1931)
Max Carey (1939)
Lip Pike (1940)
Willie Foster (1945)
Ray Brown (1955)
Mule Suttles (1956)
Wes Ferrell (1964)
Early Wynn (1970)
Cool Papa Bell (1973)
Willard Brown (1976)
José Méndez (1985)
Nellie Fox (1997)
Edd Roush (1997)
Rollie Fingers (2000)
Charley Jones (2003)
Alejandro Oms (2006)
Synopsis:
There are two main ideological differences between my pHOM and the official HOM. First, I think we elected too many players from baseball's earliest eras, which is why so many in my "out" group are generally from the pre-1940s. I actually think most voters agree with me on this point now that we look back on it with hindsight. The other difference is that I think we elected too many Negro League players without having enough data on them. Many HOM voting colleagues may not agree with me on this, though recently collected data does make some look like worse selections than at the time.
But when looking at the "ins" and "outs" from this list, the main thing to note is that these are almost all about personal preferences at the margins. There are no slam-dunk guys on the outside looking in, and there are no frankly indefensible electees to be kicked out. That's what the HOM was meant to achieve. We'll all disagree on the fringes, but that's only because we have to draw the line somewhere, and the nature of our uncertainty makes the guys near that line an intellectual toss-up.